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Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-361

1527-1900

Leigh Binford,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

In January 1932 in El Salvador, indigenous and nonindigenous peasants in (mostly) western departments carried out an uprising that resulted in the deaths of a few dozen policemen, government representatives, and landowners. The better armed and organized Salvadoran army quickly quelled the rebellion, then murdered between 10 and 30 thousand persons in cold blood. The insurrection and succeeding matanza (massacre), as it has come to be known, were watershed events in Salvadoran history, helping to shape collective hopes and fears to the present. They initiated 50 years of military rule and continue to be discussed and debated to this day. The authors interrogate memories of the massacre through the lens of epistemological relativism: “Our memories might surrender to pressures for change, or they might resist those pressures, but in any case memories are the negotiated terrain between what actually happened and how we express what happened in social context” (p. 17). Hence a good part of the book is dedicated to documenting the relationship between politics and memory, how it is that “subjectively constituted memory groups” (p. 215), including historians, tell stories about the past that are shaped, albeit unconsciously, by vested political interests. “Politics,” they conclude, “is based on memory and memory is inherently politicized” (p. 249).Two long chapters demonstrate changing representations of the insurrection for left- and right-wing politicians in the context of an unchanging informational base. The discussion is well-documented and the authors do a generally good job of linking historical memory to political context. However, their declaration of epistemological relativism is somewhat undermined by an interest in rescuing a generally unrecognized local and ethnic agency in the uprising, which has more commonly been analyzed in terms of what they refer to as “Communist causality.” They cite newly discovered evidence from Moscow archives that points to limited Communist organizational successes in western El Salvador. Though they have not staked out a firm position, the authors come close to affirming a truth discourse based on this new evidence, which undermines the overarching epistemological relativism. But if professional historians also form part of subjectively constituted memory groups (and the authors admit this; p. 257) then one might argue that the interest in rescuing indigenous agency — to the exclusion of, say, class agency — situates the authors’ viewpoint within a currently dominant identity politics.A second, fascinating section moves to the terrain of testimonial literature and its role in shaping historical memory. The key document here is Salvadoran poet and writer Roque Dalton’s biography cum testimonio of Miguel Mármol, based on a series of conversations carried out in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1966. Mármol was an important member of the Salvadoran Communist Party and one of the few “insiders” to have inscribed his memories of the period, for which reason Mármol’s recall of the events of 1932 exercised significant influence, in particular reinforcing the “Communist causality” hypothesis disputed here. The authors were the first academics to obtain access to the Dalton family archive and the writer’s original notes. A detailed and insightful sketch of the writer-poet leads into examination of the discursive strategies he employed in order to convert 61 pages of densely packed, handwritten text into more than 500 pages of ostensibly first-person testimony. In undertaking the task, Dalton added and subtracted elements and imposed chronological order on notes that moved back and forth in time. Most importantly for the authors’ general argument, Dalton projected his class politics onto the text: “Miguel Mármol is noteworthy for its failure to provide more than a passing reference to Indians and to the ethnic dimension of the 1932 uprising. But Dalton’s notes indicate that Mármol discussed ethnicity more frequently and was willing to acknowledge an ethnic foundation to the rebellion” (p. 166).This is an extremely well-written book on a provocative theme. As a detailed study in the reciprocal relationship of politics and memory, its interest transcends the specifics of the case. I have mentioned as a potential problem with this work the unresolved tension between a desire for historical truth (through the “rescue” of indigenous agency) and epistemological relativism, which sees memory (including that of professional historians) as shaped by subjectively constituted memory groups. But this very problem provides scope for a productive discussion in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate classes in history, anthropology, and political science, among other disciplines. The book concludes with a useful 95-page appendix of documents referred to in the text, which should be of particular value in classroom discussion.